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I choose a 40-minute drive to Croton instead of an hour-and-a-half drive to Clove Lakes Park on Staten Island for Brood II of the periodical cicadas this morning (Matthew Wills, the Brooklyn naturalist who writes the Backyard and Beyond blog, was heading...

Cicadas took over my neighborhood, and most of Staten Island, in 1962. We called them 17-year-locusts and we used a magnifying glass to burn holes in the discarded exoskeletons. I was 8.
By 1979, I had learned that they were really cicadas, not locusts, but I was living in the Adirondacks, beyond their range, so I missed them....

Scientists in Massachusetts are conducting a fascinating climate change study using baseline data collected in the mid 1800s by Henry David Thoreau. I wrote about it a few days ago for Connecticut Audubon Society's blog, here.

If we needed a reminder that anything we put down our storm drains ends up in Long Island Sound and its tributaries, we got one recently in Mamaroneck, where millions of tiny plastic pellets washed up on Harbor Island Park.
I wrote about how a local resident got to the bottom of it, on Save the Sound's Green Cities Blue Waters blog. Click here....